Along the sunbaked banks of the Rio Hondo, Benny Perea squats in a squalid homeless camp littered with trash and reeking of urine and feces.

The 78-year-old Navy veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars has few possessions: denim shorts, tank top, pair of jeans and a blanket.

Missing from this sparse collection is the Purple Heart he earned for a combat injury during a tour in Vietnam.

Perea is one of 6,248 veterans living in shelters, cars, under bridges and beneath freeway overpasses in Los Angeles County — home to the nation’s largest homeless population of veterans.

“I need a bed and a shower so I can clean up and look like a human being,” Perea said. “I just want a bed of my own. I don’t want to spend the last years of my life living on the street.”

For many veterans living on the streets, there is some good news: The number of homeless veterans in Los Angeles County has been shrinking. Since 2011, the number of homeless vets in the county has declined 23 percent, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

Despite that figure, those who provide aid to homeless veterans said there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to stabilize the lives of these veterans.

The reduction comes as the Veterans Administration is in the third year of a six-year campaign to end homelessness among vets.

“The VA has a four-pronged, comprehensive plan to end homelessness,” said Valvincent Reyes, clinical assistant professor and military field education coordinator at the USC School of Social Work.

Central to the VA’s efforts is the use of Housing and Urban Development-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing vouchers, which pay for permanent housing for veterans. The vouchers are often coupled with additional support such as medical care, drug and alcohol treatment and job training. More than 700 vouchers have been handed out in Los Angeles County since 2009, according to VA officials.

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The decline is most apparent in the South Bay, which has experienced the largest decrease in homeless veterans — from more than 2,500 in 2011 to 685 in the most recent count released by LAHSA in August.

However, ending homelessness among veterans remains a tall task. Homeless populations of any stripe are transient in nature, and therefore difficult to count and assess. In many cases, homeless veterans resist help from the aid organizations or are not ready to take advantage of subsidized housing.

“In the Long Beach area, there are 164 on the streets. Reaching them with services is difficult,” said Fermin Servin, VA Long Beach Healthcare Systems homeless outreach social worker. “Some of the issues like substance abuse and mental health issues means they would be set up to fail in the VASH program.”

Veterans must abstain from drug use to use the vouchers.

Finding enough housing and directing a population often reluctant to utilize services is also a constant struggle.

“It’s not uncommon for the VA to take three or four years for us to get a homeless person to trust us enough to connect them with services,” said Richard Beam, spokesman for the Long Beach VA Healthcare System.

Marked by routines and rituals, the military aptly prepares soldiers to survive in a combat zone. Unfortunately, the regimented approach of the military often leaves them ill-prepared for life after the armed services.

“When you have been told what to wear and what to do all the time, it’s difficult to adjust to life outside the military,” said Kristin Zaleski, a clinical assistant professor at USC who specializes in veterans issues.

When soldiers leave the military they often have to find housing, shop for food and land a job for the first time in life. For some, the experience can be intimidating.

“When you’re in the Army, your rent is paid, and when you get hungry, you just go to the chow hall. Everything is taken care of for you,” said Joe Leal, an Army veteran and founder of Vet Hunters, a group that connects homeless veterans with services.

The stress of fending for themselves perhaps for the first time is often coupled with social anxiety. Vets return from combat to a civilian world that appears to be obsessed with shallow pursuits and insignificant details.

“They have lived through life-and-death scenarios on a regular basis, so the arguments and conversations they hear in civilian life seem trivial,” Zaleski said.

This estrangement from civilian life can cause vets to isolate themselves from their family and friends.

“Sometimes the thing a vet loves the most is being alone because they feel like no one is judging them when they are alone,” Leal said.

One in five combat veterans return home with some level of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Veterans report having nightmares in which they repeatedly relive the horrors of their war experiences and often become hostile toward family members and friends.

“It’s like watching a horror movie. Veterans replay traumatic memories. They can’t sleep because they keep playing back in their mind the traumatic experience from the field,” Reyes said.

Rarely do veterans speak up about their PTSD or the physical injuries.

“If there is a flag from self-assessment, than you go into therapy, but now you can’t go see your family,” Zaleski said.

The military routinely will not release soldiers and sailors who suffer from PTSD until they are treated.

Carrying baggage from the battlefield and being ill-equipped for civilian life, it’s understandable why some veterans find themselves on the street, especially those vets from poor families and those with little social support.

“The people who find themselves homeless are veterans who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds,” Zaelski said. “They entered the military with no money and leave with no money. They often have no family and no place to go after the military.”

More than 40 years removed from combat, Perea said he still has nightmares about his time in Vietnam. He never sought counseling and turned to drugs shortly after he returned from battle.

“I’ve been using for 30 years,” he said.

Vets and social workers alike agree the military must change its exit process to better prepare servicemen for life after the armed services. The current process is too generalized and doesn’t provide enough counseling.

“Before you are honorably discharged, you go to a career counselor who gives you information that is generalized,” Reyes said. “The career counselor doesn’t have individualized services fit for you. He gives you some referrals for colleges and encouragement to fill out a resume.”

Leal said his exit interview conducted at Fort Drum in New York included plenty of information on jobs, college options and services in the area surrounding the base, but no information about those resources in Leal’s home state of California. The exit process, Leal said, was almost worthless.

“They train you to be a warrior, but they exit you without any additional training,” Leal said. “I didn’t have a plan at all when I left the military. All I knew was I didn’t want to deploy again. But then I found out that the jobs weren’t there.”

Zaleski and Reyes said the military should partner vets with social workers and job counselors earlier in the exiting process. But both acknowledged that doing so would increase the cost to the armed services and doubted the money for such a program exists.

The VA is available to vets after they discharge, but navigating the large bureaucracy can seem daunting.

“When they are about to take off that uniform, the vast majority don’t have a clue what the VA has to offer them,” Beam said. “It has always been a struggle to tell the military leadership in our community to be an active resource in our community. I wish we had more employees. I wish we were tighter knit with Department of Defense when these young people begin to take off the uniform and begin to transition.”

Leal and two volunteers from Vet Hunters recently descended into the homeless camp along the Rio Hondo where Perea and at least two dozen more transients live.

Leal and his crew treat their encounters with the homeless like combat missions.

“We work in pairs and each guy covers his partner’s back,” Leal said.

The camps are divided into sections. Under the 10 Freeway overpass, the homeless prop up tents and have a communal open fire where they cook meals and keep a sharp eye on their neighbor’s belongings.

To the north, Perea lives under the Ramona Boulevard bridge, along with homeless drug addicts and gangbangers. He has lived on the street for the past five years.

Leal went to visit Perea in hopes of getting him into permanent housing. But drug abuse has complicated matters for Perea, who barely dodged death in combat when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded near his head and killed a man in his unit.

“We want to get Benny into housing, but if he goes to a facility right now he is going to get drug-tested and they are going to kick him out,” Leal said.

Leal plans to connect Perea with a program that not only treats his substance abuse issues, but also gets him counseling for PTSD. Connecting vets with services is at the core of the Vet Hunters mission.

“We are the eHarmony of homeless vets. I gather resources and connect them to the vets,” Leal said.

Vet Hunters was born out of Leal’s work with the Army Reserve. During drill weekends, Leal met veterans who lived out of their cars and barely had enough gas money to make it to and from the base. Leal started calling on homeless organizations to connect needy veterans with services.

Housing veterans, who accounts for one in nine homeless people in the county, is still a struggle.

“There is this whole not-in-my-backyard thing people do about housing the homeless, including homeless veterans,” Leal said.

Beam can relate. Property owners, he said, are resistant to taking VA vouchers to house homeless vets.

“One of the challenges is to find willing landlords to say they are willing to take that person with a voucher,” Beam said.

For example, Leal is trying to secure spots for homeless veterans in a housing development under construction in El Monte.

El Monte Veterans Community will house 40 homeless vets in studio apartments. The project is the brainchild of El Monte City Councilman Juventino “J.” Gomez. A veteran of the Marine Corps, Gomez’s two sons served combat tours in the Middle East and his grandson is currently in the Marine Corps. The apartment complex is slated to open in early 2014, but Gomez said it’s a project that is long overdue.

“People should be ashamed. We celebrate Veterans Day on 11/11 and everyone thanks the vets, but we need to do more,” he said. “I pray to God this housing development is going to be a model for other cities.”

But the reluctance on the part of veterans to take advantage of the services available continues to be a major problem.

“These guys are coming home from combat feeling invincible,” Beam said. “The last thing on their minds is what services they might need. They can’t imagine that things might go wrong and they will end up on the street.”